“This mobile app is for parents and schools to better support their children’s educational journey through improved communications. The centrally coordinated initiative, available on IOS and Android for parents, allows schools to send updates on programmes and activities. It also allows parents to perform administrative functions such as providing consent for their children to participate in school activities,” said MOE in a press release issued today.

Launching the app at Huamin Primary School, Ong said, “For teachers, I think this is a major improvement. I really hope using this Gateway, we can cut down on administrative work for our teachers.

“This hopefully frees up more time for our teachers so that they can better focus on what they are good at, which is teaching,” he added.

Parents can use their SingPass accounts, SMS 2FA or OneKey Token to gain access to Parents Gateway.

Through this dedicated account, parents will be able to receive information and perform administrative functions for their children, even if the children are in different classes, or from different schools.

Additional services will be added to the Parents Gateway portal incrementally. For example, by the end of 2019, parents can look forward to completing travel declarations on their mobile devices, and updating their contact details.

Parents Gateway was first piloted in small groups in 10 schools in 2017. Following the successful trial, 56 more schools joined the Early Adopters programme in 2018, and trialled the use of the app with small groups of parents.

All 66 schools will work towards rolling out Parents Gateway to their entire school by the first quarter of this year. MOE will also progressively roll out the Parents Gateway app to all schools.

The initiative of Parents Gateway has been taken towards the Smart Nation journey of Singapore.